museum Archives - Archive Books

The Blue Room

The Blue Room by the artistic duo Tehnica Schweiz (Gergely László and Péter Rákosi) is an installation comprising a film and a porcelain sculpture collection. The work is aimed at the re-examination of our relation to architectural and material cultural heritage, merging two stories: the story of the Hungarian Museum of Fine Arts's nineteenth century plaster cast collection of antique sculptures, and that of the eighteenth century synagogue of Tata, which served to house the life-size copies of antique sculptures for more than forty years.

Those Who Are Dead Are Not Ever Gone

The institution of the ethnological museum seems to be in the midst of a serious crisis of choking. The delicacies that most of these museums have acquired, which is to say co-opted, which is to say ingested, seem to have collectively missed the track to the oesophagus and got stuck in the respiratory tract. They have been stuck there for as long as the history of mass collections, acquisitions and looting, for as long as the ruthless and ongoing extraction of cultural property in the former colonies outside of Europe. A twelve-act essay on the maintenance of supremacy, the ethnological Museum and the intricacies of the Humboldt Forum.

Ceux qui sont morts ne sont jamais partis

L’institution du musée ethnologique semble traverser une véritable crise d’étouffement. Les mets délicats acquis, ou plutôt cooptées, pour ainsi dire ingérées par la majorité de ces musées, semblent avoir été dépistés de la route vers l’œsophage et s’être coincés dans les voies respiratoires. Toutes ces choses y sont coincées depuis l’acquisition, le pillage, de ces objets. En somme, depuis l’impitoyable déracinement des biens culturels qui perdure jusqu’à nos jours dans les anciennes colonies hors d’Europe. Un essai en 12 actes sur la préservation de la suprématie, le Musée Ethnologiques et les complexités du Forum Humboldt.

Die gestorben sind, sind niemals fort

Die Institution des Ethnologischen Museums scheint sich in einer ernsten Krise des Erstickens zu befinden. Die Delikatessen, welche die meisten solcher Museen meist unter zweifelhaften Bedingungen erwarben, mit anderen Worten genossen und verschluckt haben, scheinen kollektiv den Weg in den Oseophagus verpasst zu haben und blieben stattdessen im Atmungsapparat stecken. Sie hängen dort schon so lange fest, wie die Geschichte von Massensammlungen, Erwerbungen, Plünderungen; so lange wie der rücksichtslose und fortwährende Abbau von Kulturgut in den ehemaligen Kolonien außerhalb Europas bereits andauert.

Assaf Gruber. The Storyseller

Assaf Gruber’s films examine how art affects individuals who are not necessarily drawn to it. What may seem to be at the margins of culture sometimes turns out to be its most conspicuous parts. The films’ plots emerge from the situations of their characters, addressing the ways in which personal stories become intertwined with political ideologies, and how social relations between private and public spheres are shaped.

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